Last night's fare was two Lifetime movies, one called "Don't Wake Mommy" which had had its "world premiere" the night before, and another called "Bad Sister" which was having its "world premiere" last night. "Don't Wake Mommy" was written and directed by one Chris Sivertson but followed the Christine Conradt formula so closely he (or she?) might as well have called it "The Perfect New Mom." The gimmick is that Donna (Reagan Pasternak) and her husband, firefighter Brad (the genuinely hot Dean Geyer — at least Sivertson did not follow the usual Lifetime convention of casting good-looking men only as villains!), are about to have a baby girl, Ava. Meanwhile, Beth (Sara Rue, whose IMDb.com head shot shows her in a nurse's uniform even though her character, though established as a nurse, isn't shown working as one) is introduced threatening the married (to someone else) doctor who fathered her child-to-be, a boy named Robert. She, the doctor and his wife have a confrontation in which Beth takes out a large kitchen knife and threatens to kill either the other two or herself, but she eventually slinks away in frustration and logs on to a Web site for new mothers, where she and Donna meet. The two women ultimately meet face-to-face and become friends, and use each other as baby sitters as needed. Only, since Sivertson's script has already established that Beth is crazy, we're bracing ourselves for the eventual (and inevitable) scenes in which Beth starts manifesting her craziness around Donna and gets in the way of Donna, Brad and their kid. "Don't Wake Mommy" — a rather confusing title — is Lifetime at its most routine, a by-the-numbers psycho thriller in which Sara Rue doesn't even achieve the appealingly chilly psychopathology of her predecessors in this sort of role (she makes Ashley Dulaney's performance as the analogous character in "The House Sitter" look better by comparison than I thought Dulaney was when I watched that film) and the denouement is all too predictable — indeed, throughout this movie we're anticipating each turn of the plot at least two commercial breaks ahead, evoking memories of Dwight Macdonald's praise of the 1941 version of "The Maltese Falcon" for keeping us a beat or two behind the director (the young John Huston, making his first film) instead of always ahead of him!
Review of Dark Intentions
